Project: Custodes Castellan Knight - Concept through to design pt1

Love it or hate it, my design for a Custodes Castellan Knight has had a mixed response, so much so that I feel the need to justify my decision making.  But first I would just like to clarify what the original concept was.  The Custodes Knight is a relic from the past, manufactured on Terra and a prototype to the current Imperial knights.  With this as my mantra, I did not need to stick to the original design by GameWorkshop.  I was free to model it on the Custodes aesthetic.  

As most of you will be aware my design is based on the Forge World's Legio Custodes Telemon Heavy Dreadnought and I have to say is probably one of my favourite designs for 40K EVER!  Speaking of which I couldn't mention the Telemon with out mentioning the Mondoshawan from the film Fifth Element, in my opinion one of the top 10 Sci Fi films of all time, the Mondoshawan had such a unique design and akin to my next contender.  The original terminator in the early days of 40K,  mkI Tactical Dreadnought Armour, I remember queuing 40 deep outside GamesWorkhop Liverpool for an hour waiting for the shop to open to buy this bad boy, it is currently sitting in my mate Otty's bit box of things to do :)

Images owned by Games Workshop, ForgeWorld and the film Fifth Element 

Ok so we have my mantra of 'Custodes looking' and my influences of 'gold and flamboyant shoulder pads' the next part would be tricky to get the design to fit around the basic shell of the Castellan while fitting all the guns in.  So for once I actually sketched out some preliminary designs on scrap paper.

I really liked my second design because it's almost a complete copy of eh Telemon, but I didn't think the Siegebreaker cannons would fit, the shoulder joints would be in the way.  I decided to reduce the overall mass of the pouldrons and house the gun higher up.  It only just fit there to be honest, if I wanted to use both Siegebreaker barrels either side I would have had to make the pouldrons even bigger.  I think that would have made the Knight too top heavy so I had to settle for a single barrel in the end, which I think was a compromise I was not happy with.

I did some slicing and dicing to get the ideal design of head for my knight.

I fleshed out the chest plate with Plasticard

Kit basing a Shieldbreaker missile housing from a whirlwind kit.

I used plasticard to form the basic structure of the pouldrons.

Then a glued more plasticard to strengthen the structure.  I couldn't find my mini clamps so clothes pegs did just as good a job :)

Testing to see if they fitted.

I little bit of body filler and a lot of sanding, followed by more plasticard I had my basic top half completed.